Another big reminder on how seriously imparing the patent granting process is ... - Sandip
http://www.w3.org/2003/08/patent W3C Holds Ad Hoc Meeting on Recent Court Decision, Launches Public Discussion List ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- By now, most of those reading this know of the recent court case of Eolas v. Microsoft in regards to US Patent 5,838,906. The patent claims to cover mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object. The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object's data. See the patent claims for details and for the precise scope of the patent. This patent may potentially have implications for the World Wide Web in general, including specifications from W3C. In the near term, Microsoft has indicated to W3C that they will very soon be making changes to its Internet Explorer browser software in response to this ruling. These changes may affect a large number of existing Web pages. W3C does not yet have any indication of what action, if any, other vendors of Web tools might take. In the longer term, should the court decision be upheld in its current form, some participants suggested that other action might be required. W3C has made efforts to contact the patent holder to determine their future intentions, but has not received any reply. W3C believes that it is important for the Web community to begin now to consider and contribute to the range of technical options available. [...] -- Sandip Bhattacharya http://www.sandipb.net sandip at puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. http://www.puroga.com _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
